A Personal Note

I am currently working outside of Ottawa, and it has been bitterly cold the last 3 weeks, -27 degrees and with the wind chill as low as -37 degrees. Just finished two days of interviewing with my wonderful colleague, Rebecca Foon, and getting in and out of the car with the cold was a challenge to say the least. We were interviewing people from the Ottawa Renewable Energy Cooperative, remarkable group of dedicated Board members and volunteers. Once again, I am reminded of how much innovation and work is happening across this country at the local level, and struggle with the questions of how to connect the dots between all of this work, and how to scale up and out these innovations?

Thanks to my other wonderful colleagues, Rob Newell and Chris Strashok, we have just published another data visualization, and please go to our website, and see what we have learned about sustainable community development over the last decade.

With the cold comes brilliantly sunny days, below see a picture of my two dogs playing, Cana and Monty, when it was a little milder. Sometimes when I feel bogged down with my work, I look out the window and see the both of them playing, and the picture becomes clearer again, it is about joy, beauty, beings, and trusting in nature to provide. In this picture, they are playing back and forth with something from the compost, they leap into our bin, and then one chases the other, until one buries the 'treasure'. Then the other digs it up and the game starts all over again.

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